He did so quite openly, even sometimes when he went no further than Manchester, and though many of his colleagues in the town did not approve, the lay population were quite accustomed to seeing him dressed as one of themselves. “There’s something about a parson’s collar that puts people off,” Howat had once said to Doxley, of the Congregational Church, “especially in such a confined space as a railway compartment, where they have nothing to do but stare. It makes them uncomfortable among themselves, they feel under constraint with one another—they either talk at’ you, or else relapse into a brooding silence which you can feel to be anti-clerical. When I was a young fellow, just beginning, I used to wear the whitest and highest of clerical collars because I was so proud of my profession, but now I think I’m less proud of that than I am of my common humanity. I feel that if I’ve got to wear something that marks me out as different or superior to others, then in fairness to them I ought to travel first-class—like officers in the army.”
